tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2012://1 2012-01-28T17:49:37Z Movable Type 3.35 tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2008://1.42 2008-12-29T22:53:17Z 2009-01-21T02:42:43Z

I'm very happy to announce that IN THE MOUTH has just been selected to receive the 2008 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for a significant contribution to Jewish literature. I'm especially proud to join a list of winners that includes some...

Eileen Edward Lewis Wallant Award]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2009://1.43 2009-01-11T21:05:19Z 2009-01-11T21:35:01Z

And another nice piece of news... In the Mouth has just been selected as a finalist for the Sophy Brodie Medal, awarded by the American Library Association to an author whose work represents "the most distinguished contribution to Jewish literature...

Eileen In the Mouth has just been selected as a finalist for the Sophy Brodie Medal, awarded by the American Library Association to an author whose work represents "the most distinguished contribution to Jewish literature for adults" that year. The winner will be announced in another few weeks. In the meantime, here's a link to the website: Sophie Brody Medal]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2009://1.44 2009-02-03T20:45:28Z 2009-02-03T20:49:09Z

Marian took me to the auto show in Detroit, just as the show was closing, and as we wandered the gigantic convention floor full of gleaming sports cars, adorable electric putt-putts, and trucks whose tires stood taller than my head,...

Eileen Grand Torino, a movie I never would have appreciated before I moved here. I would have dismissed a retired Polish autoworker like Walt Kowalski as an uneducated bigot who had worked with his body all his life because he was too thickheaded to get a better education and whose only method for solving problems was to curse people, beat them up, or shoot them. But the neighborhood Marian grew up in isn’t far from the street where Walt Kowalski lives, and his father could have played the part. True, his father worked for the auto industry as an architect rather than on the line. But he abides by much the same code as Walt. At 86, he only recently gave up playing hockey. Like Walt, he’s obsessive about the appearance of his house and lawn; he used to mow his grass religiously … with a scythe. And given what I know about his resistance against the Nazis and Communists before he and Marian's mother walked out of Poland, even if he muttered beneath his breath about his neighbor's religion or ethnicity, he would probably risk his life to help the guy. Before I moved to the Midwest, I wouldn't have understood an autoworker’s pride in the cars he made or why he might have wanted to toss a rock at the Corolla I was driving. I grew up in New York and couldn't have found Michigan on a map. My uncle owned a Pontiac dealership in Queens, and, like a teenager who still believes the stork brings babies, I assumed that automobiles came from Long Island. I also was brought up to think that anyone with ambition or smarts would acquire an education so he or she could sit behind a desk rather than stand on an assembly line. What kind of parent would discourage his kids from attending college on the grounds that if a factory job was good enough for him, it was good enough for them? Such an ethos seemed nonsensical until I met people who believed they deserved respect for being tough enough to withstand a grueling day of labor and whose joy in life derived from spending time with their families or sipping beer and barbecuing sausages with their friends in their well-maintained back yards. Why spend all those years in college learning things you might never use if you could earn a better wage making cars? Bad enough that people who like to buy nicely packaged steaks and boneless, skinless chicken don't want to know who slaughtered those cows or skinned those chickens. How can consumers denounce the workers who manufacture the products they want or need for demanding to be paid not only a subsistence wage, but enough to be able to afford a decent house and medical care? Easterners tend to think they know the Midwest better than Midwesterners know it. I once sent a novel to an editor in New York and was amazed when she circled a passage in which the characters huddled in their basement to avoid a tornado, as my son and I used to huddle in our basement when the sirens blared. "THERE ARE NO TORNADOES IN THE MIDWEST!" the editor scrawled in red. I find it difficult to sit still while people back east quote erroneous statistics about how much auto workers supposedly make per hour or Southern politicians brag about how they don't need to ask for handouts because their factories produce automobiles more cheaply than ours, as if one reason for that disparity weren’t that Southern factories get their electricity at a cheaper rate because it derives from government-financed TVA projects. Anyone who lives here knows there's plenty of blame to go around. When Marian and I drove to Chicago a few weeks ago, we left his Explorer home because my Toyota gets so much better mileage. When we hit a pothole and got a flat, we changed the tire much more easily than the owners of the American-built SUVs that hit that same pothole because their spares were located underneath their vehicles and had rusted in place. But before you hold autoworkers responsible for the unavailability of a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon without contributing to global warming, before you fault them for thinking that Americans might still take pride in working with their bodies, before you deny them government support to enable them to train for jobs in an economy yet to come, maybe you ought to slip behind the steering wheel of their lives, take a test drive ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2009://1.45 2009-05-02T12:26:42Z 2009-05-02T12:31:02Z

I hope you will pardon my immodesty, but I am going to post the text of the speech given by Mark Shechner, one of the judges of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, which I won this year for IN THE...

Eileen I hope you will pardon my immodesty, but I am going to post the text of the speech given by Mark Shechner, one of the judges of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, which I won this year for IN THE MOUTH. I read this whenever I get too depressed to sit down at the computer and write. Presentation of Wallant Award for Eileen Pollack for In the Mouth. In the sort of work that Thane and Vicki and I do in making these decisions on behalf of the Wallant Committee, there are no rules of reading and judgment. Yes, of course, the purpose of the prize is to promote the work and the name of a Jewish writer whose writing is either just getting underway or, for one reason or another, underappreciated. They haven’t achieved the national acclaim that in our estimation their writing deserves. So, the uncovery of the unknown or underappreciated is of course a ground rule. Apart from that, we have no guiding instructions, no shared principles, no dominant aesthetics, no imperatives of subject matter or cultural orientation. We don’t bring any fancy equipment or theories to our work. ... we apply the only test we permit ourselves: the reader’s test, which any of you might apply as well in our place. The book we are looking for is one that says to us: “Here I am. I’m the one you are looking for. Look no farther.” I suppose then that reading is not much different from falling in love or buying a car. We settled by easy consent on Eileen Pollack’s collection of stories, In the Mouth. In it, Eileen Pollack has managed to take the lives of retired Jews and reveal the strangeness and desperation of aging. Yes, she writes of other things too, but the stories of aging Jewish men, usually dentists, leave indelible marks, like ornate tattoos, in the reader’s mind. She presents us, for example, with Milton Rothstein, a retired dentist dying of AIDS that he picked up from a Latina woman who had been at one time a hooker. Another Jewish man kills himself years after taking the life of a Chinese worker whom he had gotten pregnant in his work place. Both of these stories are set in Boca Raton, that mellifluous Spanish name for “Rat’s Mouth,” but which one of Pollack’s characters calls “Boca Loca.” And with good reason. Boca was never more loca than in Eileen Pollack’s stories. In other stories, we discover Siamese twins who share a 3-chambered heart. We have a mother whose milk won’t come for her own baby but will come for the baby of another woman. (Is this the ultimate milchige story?) We have an old Jewish man who turns out to have lied about his past all his life and now wants his son to arrange a bris for him so that he can be buried in an orthodox graveyard next to his wife. (So, a fleishige story next.) Such situations reflect Milt Rothstein’s late life bitter observation: “I never read a single true word about getting old. Not in any book. Not in any newspaper. The truth about getting old is that every single person you’ve ever loved dies. And you’re not supposed to care. It’s the natural order of things. Well, let me tell you. When every person you’ve ever loved dies, you feel like dying with them.” Pollack’s characters are tormented by age and its losses and its strange turns. And along with those who are younger, they are tormented by sex: the sex they get, the sex they don’t get, the sex they no longer get, and the sex that kills them or drives them to kill. The body ages, but eros never dies. However, Eileen Pollack doesn’t give us sociology-as-fiction, though there is plenty of that to be found. She gives us the world she knows – the world of aging Jews, and her Boca Loca is an imaginary condo with real Jews in it. So it is no surprise to find her blurbed at the back of the book by such a writer as Lorrie Moore, since Moore is one of the writers she reminds me of. But the writer she calls most to mind is Bernard Malamud, and I remember thinking to myself as I read “Bris,” “This is Malamud reborn. A true transmigration of souls, the soul of one leaping mystically into the body of the other, almost like the birth of a Dalai Lama. The voice is his, the rueful human predicaments are his, the tragic-absurd universe is his, the Catskill Kafka is his, the intimations of mortality are his, the gall bladder attacks of reality are his, as is the incurable heartburn of love, the fusion of the gemutlich and the meshugah is his, the ordinary world transfigured into something tabloid-strange is his, Pollack’s way of turning the plain borscht of experience into the Manischewitz Kosher Wine of art recalls him. The distant God who presides like a cosmic Sid Caesar over the great comedy special of piety and pratfall recalls him. Certainly the story “Bris” could be bootlegged into the next Malamud anthology and nobody – nobody but us – would know the difference. And I find myself smitten by the voice: the intentionally style-less style. The utterly confident plain speech whose metaphors are so casually a part of the voice that they never have to announce themselves. A wholly self-assured writer, Eileen Pollack lets the situation do the work: she is a situation writer rather than either an action writer or a “slow-down-for-the-glorious-texture-of-life” writer. She can do the latter: there are plenty of fully-realized tableaux in the stories, and I particularly admire the way she handles the banter between old Jewish men. There is no corresponding banter among her women, and a woman has to join the company of men, as on a golf course, to enter into the charmed circle of joking, chiding, nudging, and kvetching. But Pollack doesn’t ply us with portentous descriptions that topple over into deep symbols. She simply writes with the human situation always in front of her and lets the human surprises do the work of astonishing us. Her motto could be the motto of Raymond Carver: no tricks. She has an easy way with the English vernacular, and I suspect that the pulse of her prose may owe everything to a childhood in the Catskills, in Liberty, New York, where she was born, where her grandparents owned and operated a small hotel and her father was the town dentist . Though she is a younger writer, Eileen Pollack is saturated in that world of older Jews, the generations of her parents and grandparents and, one senses, generations before. She presents us with something of an old world vision, a world conceived years and years ago in Yiddish and carried out in English In her writing one hears tales of love and duty and trouble and deep intimacy, of domesticity achieved and domesticity squandered. One hears generations of keening, grumpy, joking, lamenting Jews, the criers and the kibitzers, as the late, wonderful writer Stanley Elkin called them. Little wonder that In the Mouth spoke to the judges right away, saying ““Here I am. I’m the one you are looking for. Look no farther.” And we didn’t. On behalf of Thane Rosenbaum and Victoria Aarons. Mark Shechner tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2009://1.46 2009-06-03T17:38:00Z 2009-06-03T17:46:06Z

Recently, I was pleased to learn that IN THE MOUTH was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize, and last week I found out that the collection was awarded a silver medal in Foreword Magazine's Best Books of 2008 contest....

Eileen Recently, I was pleased to learn that IN THE MOUTH was a finalist for the Paterson Fiction Prize, and last week I found out that the collection was awarded a silver medal in Foreword Magazine's Best Books of 2008 contest. tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2010://1.49 2010-01-12T18:05:08Z 2010-01-12T18:07:40Z

This is the only known photo of my family's hotel, other than the photo of the dining room I uploaded to this blog last year. Amazing that in all the years we owned Pollack's, no one thought to take...

Eileen This is the only known photo of my family's hotel, other than the photo of the dining room I uploaded to this blog last year. Amazing that in all the years we owned Pollack's, no one thought to take a picture. Then again, everyone was too busy working there! Both photos, the main entrance and the dining room, came to me courtesy of Jeff Brown, who, in his youth, worked at Pollack's as a waiter.]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2010://1.50 2010-04-19T12:17:15Z 2010-04-19T17:56:44Z

A few weeks ago, after nine members of the Hutaree militia were arrested in and around Ann Arbor, an editor at The Times asked me to follow up my series on the election by writing an op-ed piece about militia...

Eileen The Extremists Next Door And here's the original essay, as I wrote it, followed by the photos Marian took of that militia event we attended: The flags flapping above the picnic area warned “Liberty or Death” and “Do Not Tread on Me,” while the man behind the registration table sold bull’s eyes and IRS 1040 forms to be used as targets for the adult and youth shooting contests later in the day. But most of the action at last Saturday’s “Militia Field Day aka Tax Blast: Open Carry Family Picnic & Tea Party,” held at Island Lake Recreation Area in Brighton, Michigan, consisted of militia members and their families chowing down on pulled pork and kielbasa. One militia man squatted beneath a tree, giving lessons on how to start a fire using two sticks. Another played “Dixie” on his harmonica. A tiny girl in pink clutched a stuffed dinosaur with one hand and her father with the other; like most of the militia members, he wore army boots, fatigues, and a big black pistol on his hip. Tax Blast is an annual event. But this year, the emphasis seemed less on riddling 1040 forms with bullets than demonstrating that the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia is in no way affiliated with the Hutarees, an apocalyptic Christian branch of the militia, nine of whose members recently were arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate police officers and kill any nonmilitia members who stumbled upon their reconnaissance operations in the woods. Living in Ann Arbor, I don’t usually feel threatened by the militias. Most members are just indulging their fantasies of being warriors without having to sign up for the army and go to Afghanistan or Iraq. They want to be heroes and save their neighbors from disaster. Many of the guys in the yuppie southeast Michigan branch of the militia consider themselves to be socially progressive libertarians and welcome anyone, Jewish, black, or Muslim, who declares him or herself willing to defend Michigan from invasion, whether by the federal government or foreign terrorists. (The lid on one chafing dish at the picnic read “Kosher Meals Available,” while another dish proclaimed its contents to be suitable for vegans and vegetarians. The kosher dish stood empty until an exceedingly large armed man wearing a black T-shirt that read “When I Snap You’ll Be the First To Go” filled the tinfoil tray with Hebrew National hot dogs.) I even understand some militia members’ fears: I don’t like wiretaps or surveillance cameras, and, during the Bush administration, I often found myself frightened of my own government. But I am chilled to think of thousands of armed militia members from all over the country marching on Washington, D.C., and Virginia this coming Monday to “celebrate” the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing and “restore the Constitution.” “PATRIOTS WILL ASSEMBLE IN VIRGINIA AND MARCH ON WASHINGTON ON APRIL 19. THIS WILL BE AN ‘OPEN CARRY’ MARCH. BRING YOUR GUNS. PATRIOTS WILL TAKE BACK AMERICA FROM THE OBAMA OCCUPATIONAL GOVERNMENT,” reads a post to a Rush Limbaugh fan site on Google. “Civil war starts April 19, 2010? Nervous nation waits for armed march on Washington, DC (bang)” proclaims the website of a group called New World Order Fighters. Many of the militia members at the Tax Blast told me they can’t take time off from their jobs to travel to Washington for the protest. But a rifle team leader named Solo, an IT specialist who lives in Troy, plans on attending. He worries that President Obama is going to make an end run around the Second Amendment by requiring every bullet in America to be inscribed with a traceable serial number, or by pricing ammo out of the reach of the common citizen, or by allowing Hillary Clinton to negotiate an international treaty that bides us to the same anti-gun laws that European nations must obey. “I want to let people on the east and west coasts know that people in the middle of the country want to keep their guns,” Solo told me. The timing of the event – April 19 – doesn’t bother him; what bothers him is that “that asshole” Timothy McVeigh “ruined a perfectly good holiday.” Solo and most of the other militia members who intend to march on Washington aren’t planning on killing anyone. But I can’t help but wonder how can we distinguish those who are from those who aren’t? If I come upon a group of people dressed in fatigues, toting weapons, and ranting about the New World Order, how I am supposed to tell whether they belong to a slightly paranoid libertarian division of the militia, or a violently delusional, racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic branch? A few months before the Hutarees were arrested, the supervisor of a town not far from Ann Arbor called upon two brigades of the Michigan Militia, including the Hutarees, to help find two missing residents. When this story came to light, my son saw a photo of one of the Hutarees and said, “Hey, I know her.” As it turned out, the woman’s stepson was my son’s high school classmate, and my son, who considers himself a socialist, sometimes engaged the boy in friendly discussions of their opposing political beliefs. The boy’s stepmother and father live in Manchester, a town I visit to browse for antiques, attend the chicken broil, and enjoy ice cream at the Dairy Queen beside the river, although the woman apparently joined the Hutarees after meeting several members at a Ron Paul rally right here in Ann Arbor. My son also knows the militia member who coordinated the search, having interviewed the man for an article he wrote for his school newspaper describing an event at which several hundred 9/11 Truthers gathered at the University of Michigan to publicize their theory that the destruction of the World Trade Center was an inside job. I admire my son for engaging people so unlike himself in political discussions. But I hate to think of him getting in an argument with a rightwing extremist who is packing a weapon and believes that socialists are destroying our country and, as I heard on a podcast describing the reasons for the upcoming march, “the only way we can stop them is to make them stop.” Any group that sees a reason to “celebrate” the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing terrifies me. I moved to Michigan eight months before Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building. Although McVeigh wasn’t a member of the Michigan Militia, he did attend one of their meetings and practiced building bombs at a farm 120 miles northeast of Ann Arbor. At the time, Mark Koernke, aka “Mark from Michigan, the Voice of the Militia,” worked as a janitor at the U of M, where I teach, and in his off hours hosted a vitriolic radio show, which he used as a forum to support McVeigh’s incendiary views. The radio show was broadcast from Koernke’s hometown of Dexter, a quaint village a few miles up the river from Ann Arbor, where my then-husband and I would take our son to buy cider and homemade donuts. After the carnage in Oklahoma City and President Clinton’s exit from the White House, much of the militia activity in Michigan subsided. Koernke got sent to jail for fleeing the scene of a robbery he didn’t commit and resisting the efforts of police to question him. But the crazies still were out there. One afternoon in 2003, I was reading a book about a virulently racist and anti-Semitic hate group called the Christian Identity movement when I received a call from Zingerman’s Deli asking me to come downtown to finalize plans for my son’s bar mitzvah. I got in my car and, a few blocks from the restaurant, noticed Christian Identity bumper stickers on the truck in front of me. Then came the 2008 presidential campaign and the near collapse of the American economy, and the militias regained support, not only in towns to the north and west, but in the southeast corner of the state, around Ann Arbor and Detroit. The SMVM was quick to distance itself from the Hutarees; their spokesperson even hinted to me at the Tax Blast that he and his guys had a hand in alerting the FBI to the Hutarees’ agenda. But the anger and paranoia that fueled the resurgence of the militias didn’t evaporate overnight because a few extremists were arrested. Not long after the FBI took the Hutarees into custody, I tuned my laptop to the Intelligence Report, once again being broadcast from Dexter by Mark Koernke, who had served his sentence and was treating his listeners to the ominous click of a bullet being loaded in the chamber of a gun and warnings about his perimeter being secured and the first nine people who breached that perimeter being doomed. Libertarian militia members might welcome nonChristian members, but when I read on the Hutarees’ website that they were prepared to use the sword “to defend all those who belong to Christ and save those who aren’t,” I wonder what they intended to “save” me and my Jewish and Muslim neighbors from. So, despite my desire to preserve the liberties granted by our Constitution, I can’t help but be grateful that the federal government does have the power to keep surveillance on extremists of all kinds and seems able to figure out which few members of which few militias are serious about wanting to assassinate police officers or shoot people like me who might wander into the woods while they are training for Armageddon. ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2010://1.52 2010-04-19T17:13:55Z 2010-08-23T22:38:33Z

Eileen ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2010://1.53 2010-04-19T17:31:46Z 2010-08-23T22:30:12Z

Eileen ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2010://1.54 2010-04-19T17:47:06Z 2010-08-23T22:27:29Z

Marian accompanied me to the militia's Tax Blast two Saturdays ago. A militia guy was teaching everyone to make fires using two sticks. That was pretty hard, but Marian managed to get some smoke signals going using a flint and...

Eileen ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2012://1.58 2012-01-17T17:47:43Z 2012-01-17T17:48:06Z

O Magazine Clip People Magazine Clip...

Eileen O Magazine Clip People Magazine Clip ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2012://1.59 2012-01-17T17:50:22Z 2012-01-17T17:50:50Z

Q. What do Eileen, Beyonce, and Oprah have in common? A. Not much! But I am very happy to say that reviews of Breaking and Entering appeared in the January 23, 2012, issue of People Magazine (along with news of...

Eileen Breaking and Entering appeared in the January 23, 2012, issue of People Magazine (along with news of Beyonce and Jay-Z's baby), and the February 2012 issue of O Magazine. The novel is out now. There's a link to Times review on the Publications part of this website. Here are copies of the other two... ]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2012://1.60 2012-01-28T17:02:37Z 2012-01-28T17:13:59Z

I still can't believe it--Breaking and Entering just won the Grub Street National Book Prize. I'm a huge fan of Margot Livesey, who judged the award, and this means I'll get to visit all my friends in Boston when I...

Eileen Breaking and Entering just won the Grub Street National Book Prize. I'm a huge fan of Margot Livesey, who judged the award, and this means I'll get to visit all my friends in Boston when I give a reading and a craft talk as part of Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace Conference. Here's a link to the Grub Street website.]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2012://1.61 2012-01-28T17:09:03Z 2012-01-28T17:13:59Z

Here's a link to an essay I wrote about a truly upsetting incident that happened when I was visiting Israel last summer. (Might I add that I am very proud of the multitalented Sam Apple, who once, long ago, was...

Eileen The Faster Times, in which the essay appeared.) Here's the essay.]]> tag:www.eileenpollack.com,2012://1.62 2012-01-28T17:37:14Z 2012-01-28T17:49:37Z

You know, a lot of newspapers may have gone bankrupt or stopped printing book reviews, but think of all the book-lovers' websites that never used to exist. These sites reach thousands--and sometimes tens of thousands--of readers. How is that not...

Eileen Fiction Writers Review Mittenlit Jumping the Candlestick]]>